The April Fool maps are probably circulating around the web right now. Even if it is not April Fools, the impressive nature of the project naturally lends itself to spreading across the internet. People are like "Wow! This is cool. I have to show it to my friends."

EDIT: Another twenty minutes later, 1,781,856; 2452 more. That's another 122.6 per minute this past twenty, or 135.9 per minute averaged over the past half hour. That's still higher than I'm used to seeing, I'm sure of it.

But again, if I'm not seeing any major spikes, maybe the behaviour of the counter changed, which would make more sense...